Ld J'}9/ 




63d Congress [ 
1st Sestiion \ 



SENATE 



Document 
No. 236 



THE NEW DUTY OF 
AMERICAN COLLEGES 

INAUGURAL ADDRESS 

DELIVERED DURING 
THE 

INSTALLATION EXERCISES OF THE PRESIDENT OF 

MARIETTA COLLEGE, MARIETTA, OHIO 

ON OCTOBER 14, 1913 



BY 



GEORGE WHEELER HINMAN 






w 



PRESENTED BY MR. LEWIS 

NOVEMBER 13, 1913.— Ordered to be printed 



WASHINGTON 

1013 




n. OF D. 

^Q\ 22 1918 



\^vlX 






THE NEW DUTY OF AMERICAN COLLEGES. 



" Though for a long time," says Marmontel, regarding the violent 
change in government which he lived through in France — " Though 
for a long time the situation of public affairs and the fermentation of 
men's minds through all ranks of the State appeared to threaten the 
approach of some great crises, it is, nevertheless, true that it (the 
change of government) happened through the imprudence of those 
who obstinately persisted in thinking it impossible." 

" There are no pages in history more instructive," says Lecky, " and 
there are few which are more humiliating than those which record 
the judgments of great thinkers and politicians on the verge of the 
changes that have most profoundly affected the destiny of mankind." 

There are no clear oracles in the temple of nations. There is no 
sure sign by which nations are warned. The peril is silent, as a thief 
in the night. We sleep ; we wake ; and the silver cord has been loosed 
and the golden bowl broken. 

What do such lessons of history mean to us here to-day? Let us 
see. 

A Vice President of the United States has said that American col- 
leges send forth every year 25,000 young men to the battle of modern 
life, armed with the weapons of the Crusaders. 

As it stands, this statement will not do. 

College education has been, and is, real education — education of 
the kind to afford a wide view of human knowledge; of man as he 
is and has been ; of man, therefore, as he may be or should be ; of man 
in his relations to the earth he treads, the air he breathes, the human 
souls that he associates with. 

College education has been so effective in its work that it has come 
to be a belief, or a tradition, that, other things being equal, the 
college graduate, wherever placed, can judge better, choose better, 
act more wisely, advance more rapidly, and, in general, give a more 
satisfactory account of himself in life's war or life's peace than the 
man without a college education. 

And yet the flippant political criticism that I have quoted has in it 
a kernel of truth. That is a peculiarity of flippant political criti- 
cisms. This is why there are so many flippant political critics. There 
must always be a half truth to carry along the half falsehood. And 
this particular half truth is an important one. It refuses to down. 
It stands at the door and knocks. If not heeded, it still stands and 
still knocks — again and again and again. It will not be denied. It 
must be answered. 



4 THE NEW DUTY OF AMERICAN COLLEGES. 

Education is a part of national life— in a Republic it is a great part 
of national life. Whether public or private, secular or sectarian, it 
gTOATs with the growth and shifts with the changes of the Nation. It 
can no more escape this than can laws, customs, manners, or morals. 

Thus it comes that sometimes education is called upon to face new 
duties, to meet new emergencies, in which not only its hopes, aspira- 
tions and possessions, but even its very life, stand at stake. 

This, I believe, is the point we are approaching to-day — the point 
which we have almost reached to-day, and the point which we have 
been reaching toward for the last 20 years. Is this belief correct? 
Does education face any new situation of the kind that brings new 
duties? If so, what is the occasion and what is the duty? 

Who will maintain that the American people are what they were 
20 years ago? 

Some, but not many. 

Who will contend that their national aims and ambitions, senti- 
ments, loyalties, and emotions, their ideals of government, their views 
of present a flairs, their hopes of the future, their general habits of 
mind and their attitude to the laws and institutions of the country 
proceed along the same lines and within the same limits as in the 
eighties ? 

Few — very few. 

Who will believe that, if we move as fast toward pure and unlimited 
democracy in the next 20 years as we have moved in the last 20, we 
can still have the manners, morals, customs, and political institutions 
of a representative Republic ? 

None; absolutely none. 

Here, then, is a new situation; and here, with it, is a new duty — a 
duty that comes to us all and will not be denied, but comes with 
special force to those men Avho, as leaders, guides, and followers, 
teachers, trustees, and students, in high schools, colleges, and uni- 
versities, make up the forces of American education and embody its 
cause before and among the American people. 

A change of government, a putting away of an old frame, and a 
putting on of a new one, is a tremendous thing. Whether a repre- 
sentative republic be shaped over into a limitless democracy, or a 
limitless democracy be shaped over into a limitless monarchy, there 
are, sooner or later, wrenchings and distresses beyond the power of 
historians to estimate. They view the field ; they do not count the 
dead, nor measure the misery. 

A change of government ! What sign is more portentous ! And 
yet it is the sign to-day of many million Americans. Moreover, it is 
a sign that man}' other millions of Americans are looking upon with 
complacency. 

Therefore education has the imperative duty to-day to prepare men 
either to fall in with this mightj'' change intelligently or to resist it 
intelligently — to let them know just what are these institutions which 
it is proposed to bring from other ages and peoples and substitute 
for the institutions that we now have, just what the process of fitting 
100,000.000 human beings to a neAv frame of government means and 
just what are the advantages of improving the institutions that a 
nation has, from generation to generation, rather than casting those 
institutions upon the rubbish heap and taking from the rubbish heap 
the institutions cast there by other nations a century or centuries ago. 



THE NEW DUTY OF AMEEICAN COLLEGES. 5 

In a word. American education — -American education, not French 
or English or German education — owes it to itself and to the Gov- 
ernment which has been its shield and buckler for four generations to 
defend it where truth shows it to be defensible, to help preserve it 
where truth shows it to be worthy of preservation, and only when 
truth reveals that government as unendurable in its oppressions and 
incurable in its perverseness to begin training supermen for that day 
when the fate of the Nation will depend on everybody's being an abler 
lawmaker, jurist, and statesman than anybody is to-day. 

Why does education owe this dut}^ to itself? As a matter of self- 
preservation, of self-defense, for the protection of its present achieve- 
ments, of its present materials, even of its present methods, instru- 
ments, customs, traditions, and its very followers themselves. 

To change the form of government — did you ever think what it 
means, what it has meant in history? To alter the frame, literally 
the frame of government — yes, more, to remove one frame and put 
another in its stead? 

To put away that pattern of organized society within which we 
huve been fitted, from which our laws, customs, and morals have taken 
form, to which even family life has been shaped, according to Avhich 
Ave have directed our lives, our labors, our material ambitions, our 
daily hopes, ever since we haA^e been Avhat we are. In the chaos of 
the change, whether it come peaceably or " Avith bronze sandals and 
wide-floAving hair," Avhat cause Avould suffer sooner or more keenlj^ 
that the cause of education? 

If Ave judge by history, the cause of the church, perhaps, but next, 
immediately next, the cause of education. 

In the last epoch-making transition of a government to limitless 
democracy Iioaa' Avild was the ruin in AA^hich education Avas plunged — • 
its institutions closed, its teachers hunted, its students dispersed, its 
methods and systems proscribed, its whole field desolated — and then, 
no sooner driven forth as an outcast than brought back as a slaA^e, 
forced to relinquish even the appearance of freedom, to teach the 
impossibilities of Rousseau and the catechisms of Marat and Robes- 
pierre ; forced to abolish the lessons of man and history and to teach 
the lesson of a fictitious automaton and a diseased imagination ; frus- 
trated, perA'^ertecl, and corrupted in the material subjected to it by the 
incitement of children against their parents and of parents against 
their children, by the encouragement of parricide and infanticide, by 
the demoralization of the family as an aid and of the church as an 
auxiliary ; pressed to annihilate every moral intuition of the young 
and to substitute for it the exact opposite ; in short, puslied down into 
a wild, foul, unhuman condition, Avhere it remained helpless to accom- 
plish any decent mission until rescued and reenslaA^ed anew under 
barely bearable conditions by the iron arm of a Bonaparte. 

" But," I hear, " that is an old instance. It Avill not be repeated." 
Do not be deceived. It is of the verA" essence of limitless democracy 
to Avar on higher education. Higher education is unequal. Higher 
education marks intellectual inequality. Higher education does not 
]nake men intellectually equal, but makes those Avho are intellectually 
unequal more unequal still. 

Limitless democracy has tried to establish intellectual equality by 
cutting off the heads that rise aboA'e the average. But it has a more 



r: 



6 THE NEW DUTY OF AMERICAN COLLEGES. 

effective and humane Ava,v, namely, to keep the heads from rising in 
the first place. 

Do not be deceived b}^ kindly ijrofessions. Is not the same fawn- 
ing hand extended to-day to the church as to higher education? Yet 
the unlimited social democrat thirsts for the destruction of the 
church as ardently to-day as did the wildest conventionist in 1793. 

So much for the duty that higher education owes itself. There is 
then the duty that education, higher and high-school education, with 
all their forces, owe to our present form of government. 

Tt is needless to recount all the gifts and favors and safeguards 
conferred on education by this representative Republic. They are 
not less numerous than those conferred on industry, on finance, on 
commerce, on the church; it is for this reason that educators and 
educated men owe an obligation, a moral obligation, to this repre- 
sentative Republic, behind whose bulwark we live, prosper, and are 
protected in every phase and field of our affairs. 

The idea is current that we, the people of this day and this hour, 
own this representative Republic in fee simple ; that it is our right to 
use and abuse it at will. It is often asserted that it is the right of us, 
the sovereign people, now living and voting to do with it whateA^er 
the majority vote to do with it, whether from whim or fancy or pref- 
erence, whether by way of forethought, policy, or mere experiment. 

How often we hear the statement that '' It is the right of the 
majority to say '" Avhether we shall continue this Government that we 
have or set up a Government of another sort. That is, it is assumed 
that there exists a right in this present living generation, if half the 
voters plus one so elect, to exchange the present form of government 
for another — having inherited a representative Republic from our 
fathers, to bequeath something entirely different to our children, as, 
for instance, a limited monarchy or a limitless democracy. 

I remember reading in a great newspaper at the time of the last 
Roosevelt camj^aign some statements to the effect that it was the 
*' right of the American people even to make him king ; they were 
sovereign ; it was theirs to do as they pleased." 

There is no such right. There is no such right, constitutional or 
moral, man made or God made. 

The institutions which make our form and frame of Government 
are not owned in fee simple by the voters, the majority voters, at any 
given time; they are not owned, but held in trust. To-day we are 
the trustees; if, as trustees, we exchange this estate which has been 
intrusted to us for something entirely different, what will be our 
position ? 

If, having received in trust from our fathers a representative Re- 
public, we leave to our children an imlimited democracy, Avhat will 
be our position? It will be that of the trustee who exchanges a block 
of Government bonds for an unexplored mine in Mexico. 

Of course such things can be done; b.v a majority of voters sucli a 
change can be brought to pass. But that is not a question of right; 
that is a question of might. 

The case is plain as the midday sun. The men of 1776 did not give 
lives and fortunes merely to avoid paying a few taxes for a few years. 
They did not give lives and fortunes to saA'e a few dollars" tribute. 
They did not give lives and fortunes to maintain some personal prin- 
ciple or some passing preference. 



THE NEW DUTY OF AMERICAN COLLEGES. 7 

They did what they did for a permanent cause, to found something, 
to establish something, to perpetuate something. That something 
was and is this representative Eepublic. 

How jDreposterous is any other view. As if a frame of Govern- 
ment, with a gTeat Nation of interweaving generations within it, 
were to die and be born again every few years. What a condition 
to imagine. Who, then, would have fought at Bunker Hill, Sara- 
toga, Long Island, and Yorktown? Who would have agonized at 
Valley Forge? Who would have defied the rebels' fate in the Con- 
tinental Congress? 

Nobody — absolutely nobody. 

If only a few dollars of tribute had been at stake, if only a few 
years of existence had been in question, if only the American insti- 
tutions of half a generation had been the object, who would have 
fought or thought twice ? 

Nobody — absolutely nobody. 

Or who would have fought 30 years later, or 60 years later, or 80 
years later, if the treasure and the blood and the suifering had given 
no assurance, no guaranty, for the future? 

None — absolutely none. 

Men fought in the Civil War, within living memory, to preserve 
this representative Republic whole and strong, because they loved 
it — loved it, and not something else to come later — some democracy 
of Athenian or Parisian mold, some limited monarchj'- of English or 
German pattern. 

They never fought — no one fought — merel}^ to preserve it for a 
few years that it might be a good subject for barter and exchange, 
sort of trading basis or a political kaleidoscope for the children 
of the future to play with. How base the thought ! No ; they fought 
as other Americans fought in every other American war, with the 
determination to keep the institutions of this country in the frame- 
Avork in Avhich they had been handed down, to preserve this repre- 
sentative Republic as a representative Republic, and to transmit this 
trust intact to the next generation ! 

To them this representative Republic was no mere experiment 
station, no mere contract terminable at will, no mere series of op- 
tional expedients in government, but a great, growing, historical 
institution, beloved for what it had been to the fathers, was to the 
sons, and would be to the grandsons. 

We have, then, this representative Republic as a trust, not as our 
property. And it was the design of those who originally assembled 
this heritage of ours that it should come to us as a representative 
Republic and as nothing else. In other words, the nature of this 
Republic, as it is to-day, is neither accidental nor incidental. It is 
essential; it was intended to be. 

Let us add : Not only was it intended to be, but it was especially 
intended not to be what so many to-day are trying to make of it — ■ 
an unlimited democracy. 

It was design not accident that we had bequeathed to us a National 
House of Representatives and a National Senate instead of one un- 
wieldy chamber to enact the laws of the land; it was design not 
accident that the Members of these Houses were not clerks, not 
messengers, but representatives of the peoj)le; it was design not 
accident that the Senate acted less responsively than the House, that 



8 THE NEW DUTY OF AMERICAN COLLEGES. 

it proceeded more slowly, debated more deliberately, and often re- 
fused to go where the House would lead ; it was design not accident 
that the President had greater authority than the King of England 
in peace and a dictator's poAver in time of war ; it was design not 
accident that the Supreme Court was enabled to sit aloof and apart 
from both President and Congress, and, in majestic independence, 
pass its judgment on the legislative acts of them all. 

Every one of the foregoing statements calls to mind some vital 
issue of this day, some point of assauU, some subject of denunciation, 
some excuse or pretext for tearing off the old frame and substituting 
a new frame of government. 

In fact, the issues of to-day were met by the men from whom we 
inherit this Eepublic. met by Washington and Hamilton and Adams 
and John Marshall, met by them and by a host of others, and settled 
as we have received the settlement. 

They had lions to fight in those days, and they fought them. They 
had a storm of unlimited democracy to avert from this land, and they 
averted it. They had aUe and fearless and resourceful opponents to 
conquer, and they conquered them. They had a great party with a 
popular philosophy and an alluring theory to overcome, and they 
overcame it. 

There are iew arguments put forth for unlimited democracy to- 
day that were not put forth then, more freshly, more vigorously, more 
popularly, and more convincingly, for some of them had not then had 
their test of experience and failed. But those arguments were met by 
better arguments and were beaten. It was a great battle and it was 
a decisive one — so decisive that when Washington, Hamilton, and 
Adams were gone from the seats of power, leaving John Marshall 
alone on the watch tower, not even Jefferson himself, as he came after, 
ventured to alter the lines on which the decision and the victory had 
been won. 

So definite was the issue then, which confronts us again to-day; so 
definite was the triumph of the representative republic over the un- 
limited democracy ; so clear and undeniable was the design to bequeath 
to us what we now hold in trust; so conscious and indisputable has 
been the intent of those who, in war and peace, have sacrificed life 
and fortune to preserve this heritage for the successive generations. 

To this Republic, and to no other, do we owe our lawful devotion 
to-day. To this Republic do the forces of education owe their lawful 
loyalty to-day — to this Eepublic, the bulwark of their freedom in 
teaching, the guaranty of the safeguards that surround them, the pro- 
tector of the property and prosperity that replenish and extend them, 
the silent assurance of peace in the possession of their resources, the 
unnoticed influence that at tens of thousands of firesides makes pos- 
sible the means for recruiting the colleges, universities, and high 
schools of the country. 

Let one imagine for a moment this college, any college, all colleges, 
deprived suddenly of the unseen foundations provided by that great, 
stable power in Washington, and then realize what education and its 
apostles owe to the United States Government, as it is and has been 
for the last century and a quarter I 

Is there, then, no right in a ])eople to change its form of government ? 
Under the legal covenant bv which this Government is a government 



THE NEW DUTY OF AMEEICAISr COLLEGES. 9 

there is none. What constitution provides for its own subversion? 
The subversion of a constitution, our Constitution, is not a question 
of right, but of might. That is alL 

But morallj' — not legally, but morally? Is there, then, no moral 
right in a people to change its form of government? 

Under certain circumstances — yes. From history's viewpoint that 
moral right exists under certain circumstances, but only under certain 
circumstances. 

If a people be tja'annically and crushingly overtaxed and the public 
moneys be squandered for private uses against the people's will: 
if justice be stopped at its fountain and no longer can be obtained 
between man and man ; if the courts be notoriously prejudiced against 
the people and notoriously servile to the people's rules; if social 
oppressions and class despotisms become so common and so savage 
as to poison the lot of man and the life of the family ; if the protec- 
tion of life and property within the border cease to be assured ; if 
the police powers be no longer maintained to safeguard the citizens 
from within; if the military powers be so weakened or dissipated 
as to expose the people to repeated invasions from without — for 
reasons such as these a people may be morally justified for breaking 
down one form of government and setting up another in its stead. 

Yet so painful is the change, so bloody its penalties, so savage its 
excesses, so cruel its sufferings, so enormous its cost, and so uncer- 
tain its consequences that even so — even under any or several of these 
severe provocations — the moral justification is uncertain and often 
withheld by posterity. 

The question, then, is. Have we a justification — a possible, a tenta- 
tive justification — for calling down upon us 15 or 20 years hence 
these penalties and perils by our acts and policies in this country of 
ours to-day? 

Is our substance being confiscated by the taxgatherer? Are our 
public moneys being seized by our governors for their private uses? 
Have our courts ceased to dispense justice? Has our family life 
ceased to be respected ? Are we insulted, scorned, and spat upon by 
our fellow men ? Has our Government ceased to keep peace at home 
or to protect us from abroad? 

Not at all; not at all. It is contended that some business enter- 
prises are too rich; that some others are too extensive; that some 
men do not pay enough taxes; that some railroads issue too many 
stocks; that some courts are too slow: and that some officeholders are 
dishonest. 

Are such ailments, at worst, sufficient to justify a change in a form 
of government? They never have been deemed so in the past. Are 
they to be deemed so now? 

That to-day is the epoch-making question which we shall awake 
some morning to find demanding, demanding of us, an epoch-making 
answer. And to enable its followers and apostles to make answer 
intelligently is the trumpet call upon American education at this 
time. 

I anticipate the objection. Education knows no master but truth; 
education can not descend to the level of the special pleader ; educa- 
tion must be as cold as the sword of justice, as inevitable as the law 
of nature. 



10 THE NEW DUTY OF AMERICAN COLLEGES. 

True and granted ; true and granted. Yet who will deny that it 
remains even so to education to choose the field in which it shall serve 
its master, in which it shall pursue its work coldly and reach its 
conclusions inevitably? None. And it is in choosing one field of 
active work to-day that American education can discharge its duty 
to itself, to the Government over it, to the past behind it, to the pres- 
ent with it, to the future beyond it. That one field, that one par- 
ticular field, often traversed but seldom systematically worked, is the 
fi-eld of political history, political institutions, political theory, and 
political practice. 

There are courses and classes in most institutions of higher educa- 
tion, buti do not recall any just now in which, whatever else he may 
do, the young man in search of a liberal education is required system- 
atically and successively, from year to year, to learn wdiy this repre- 
sentative Republic is what it is, wherein it differs from the republics 
and democracies and monarchies of the past and the present: what 
came to it from Sparta, from Athens, from Rome, from the Italian 
Republics, from the Free Cities, from Switzerland, from the Nether- 
lands, from France, from England: why one thing was taken and an- 
other left in the building of its framework, and what is the nature of 
the once rejected materials which the American people to-day are 
urged to bring back and substitute for the materials out of which 
their frame of government was constructed a century and a quarter 

When, in times like these, we find the graduates of American insti- 
tutions of learning — ^thousands of them — going up and down the land 
to exhibit as new things the designs and devices of government which 
antedate the calendar, antedate the Christian era, almost antedate 
authentic history, is it surprising to hear the complaint that there 
is a new occasion and a new duty to which American education has 
failed to rise? 

I conceive it to be an educational duty, a college duty, to meet this 
complaint, and, as far as in me lies, to see to it that, for one. Marietta 
College assures to her graduates henceforth, in addition to the liberal 
education she so loyally and competently provides, a special education 
in the problems which, for lack of a better phrase, we term the prob- 
lems of the day. 

I conceive it to be an educational duty, here and noAv. for this in- 
5^titution to begin teaching the students, from freshman year, what 
this representative Republic is, whence its elements came, what it is 
proposed to substitute for it, and whence the substitute materials 
come. I conceive it to be an educational duty to let every student 
wdio goes hence Avith his diploma go hence with knowledge to test 
the alternative pressed so insistently on every American citizen 
to-day — the alternative between representative republic and social 
democracy. I conceive it to be an educational duty to implant in 
every student's mind at least the verdict of history on such a govern- 
ment as is proposed to us. 

I conceive this to be an educational duty that should be, must be. 
discharged under the sword of justice and the sun of truth, and, 
when so discharged, must be trusted to bring its reward. 

If this representative Republic is to endure as a representative 
republic the men of Marietta will then have done in their sphere 



THE NEW DUTY OE AMERICAN COLLEGES. 11 

all that truth can do to make it endure. If this representative Re- 
public is to give way to a limitless democracy the men of Marietta 
will then be best equipped for the supermanly duties that await them. 
And so, whether as steadfast advocates or fiery assailants of this rep- 
resentative Republic, they will at least know why they are, what 
thej^ are, and not go railing up and down the land with the stamp of 
college education on their brows and the clamor of hissing parrots 
on their tongues. 

He who would be free must first be just. He who would know lib- 
erty must first know truth. Let us follow that light. A new occa- 
sion and a new duty are here. Let us follow that light and trust that 
it will not fail, for the truth, and the truth alone, can keep us free. 

o 



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